One of the questions capture my attention because she’s explaining what does she think about the role of designers and the shift from “toasters and posters”:

What’s happening is that designers used to be those that made chairs, or those that made posters. Instead, right now they look at the way people live and they try to translate their observations into better products, better interfaces.

It’s is surely something that we all designers have to have in mind at this time: almost everything that we do is immerse on a cultural network and not anymore isolated on our local corner. Therefore, the idea of being antrophologists – as Antonelli clearly pointed out – is absolutely valuable.

This entry was written by Tomás and posted on 23 January, 2010 at 12:52 pm. It is filed under In general and tagged design. Bookmark the permalink.
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1996-2010 | (bi)gital»

Reading a post by Carlos Scolari about the publication of his paper on ‘Narrativas transmediáticas’ (Transmedia Storytelling), I came across the International Journal of Communication. The publication is an online, multi-media, academic journal – originated in the USC Annenberg School of Communication and directed by Manuel Castells y Larry Gross – that publish articles with a main focus on communication, being also open to contributions from ‘the many disciplines and approaches that meet at the crossroads that is communication study.’

Among the many things that capture my attention while reading about the publication, the concept of ‘open access’ is the one I like the most. As they clearly say,

Open Access enables authors to obtain the maximum possible exposure for their work. Freely available papers are read more, cited more, and have more impact than ones available only to paid subscribers.

It is a very good example to show that sometimes the academic media environment moves forward. I wish I could see more like this coming from the design community, where the most established journals are available under a paid subscription model.

This entry was written by Tomás and posted on 17 September, 2009 at 3:24 pm. It is filed under In general and tagged academic, journals, open access. Bookmark the permalink.
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His website (German only unfortunately) has many interesting corners like videos, photos of works, people, design, the HFG Synopsis, his library with circa 3400 book, etc.

I spent quite some time watching his photo series, I particularly loved the Sammlung gemischt a sample of boxes with objects that he has collected over the time. Apart from the objects inside, some of them really amazing, belonging to the German culture/everydaylife, the photos are tidy set and taken under the same optimal conditions, and this fact that makes the sample more consistent and interesting to follow. I also recommend the serie with knifes that contains some peculiar pieces.

Another photo section contains documentation of important stages of product research and design, a must see if you‘re interested in design and people who has visited the office from 1968 to 1992. Watching randomly I found Otl Aicher, and Joachim Krausse –probably there are some more that I am not able to recognize in their young years. The clothing and hair styles from the ‘70’s are awesome!

All of the photos depict the simple, neat, precise design concept. A real diamond in the abundance of data, despite the use of Courier for the text that I find quite tiring to read.

This entry was written by Carol and posted on 7 August, 2009 at 5:09 pm. It is filed under In general and tagged complexity, design, Hans (Nick) Roericht, hfg ulm, ideas. Bookmark the permalink.
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Without any doubt, frog design is one of the biggest and more interesting design bureaus in the world. With offices in many cities –such as San Francisco, Seattle, Amsterdam, Stuttgart or Shanghai– and clients from a list that could wallpaper an exhibition room with the heavy-weights names from any industry, they have created a strong reputation based on high caliber design and a high dosage of innovation.

In recent times, they are becoming more and more interested in communicating to an eager audience that wanted to know what and how they do by releasing a media platform –named Design Mind– that ‘includes a print magazine, a website, videos, and events.’

And now it came another piece on this communication clockwork: ‘a fine line: how strategies are shaping the future of business’, a book by Hartmut Esslinger, the person who founded the company back in 1969 in the heart of Germany’s Black Forrest. The book –according to what you can smell from ‘Chapter One: Design driven strategy’ (PDF)– is full of insights on frog design processes, based on first person experiences on the board of decisions of countless projects. It is also charmingly written, becoming a very engaging road for any reader. In brief, it’s a must.

Details

A fine line: how strategies are shaping the future of business

• Hardcover: 208 pages
• Publisher: Jossey-Bass (June 29, 2009)
• ISBN-10: 0470451025
• ISBN-13: 978-0470451021

This entry was written by Tomás and posted on 15 July, 2009 at 1:11 pm. It is filed under In general and tagged books, design, Esslinger, frog design, innovation. Bookmark the permalink.
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Worldmapper is a collection of 336 different and colorful world maps that vary in shape and size according to certain interests such as Total Population, Land Area, Income per capita, Age-of-death or Internet users among many others. The territories change their size according to specific variables. They state the diverse faces of the world we’re living and represent in many cases obscure reports only shown as statistic data which is often complicated to comprehend. And that are away from the interests of mass media.

«We need new cartographies and new ways of creating them. We have to search for new conceptual instruments and produce new tools that allow us to move in territories in constant change» –Denise Najmanovich

The size of each territory shows the relative proportion of the world's population living there.

In the image you can see a population map. The size of countries like India (yellow), Japan (purple) or China (light green) is remarkable, as well as the small size of countries like Argentina.

Cartographers Danny Dorling and Anna Barford at the University of Sheffield, in the UK started with a bunch of maps that show facts that a few people want to know. When the numbers appear in a spreadsheet generate no emotions. But when we look at the map of HIV infection and Africa is enormous compared to Europe, the image is striking. And the opposite happens when we take the map of public health spending. It is clearly a new vision of the world.

Territory size shows the proportion of all people aged 15-49 with HIV (Human Immunodeficiency Virus) worldwide, living there.

These representations, apart from showing in a very simple way a complex and uneven reality, are a simulation of it, because the reference with the origin is direct (from the numbers to an application that transform then into graphs). They create a thought that is capable of showing the dynamics.

“What I think matters most,” says Prof. Dorling, “are the new ways of thinking that we foster as we redraw the images of the human anatomy of our planet in these ways. What do we need to be able to see — so that we can act?”

And it is sure that we will rethink after confronting with these maps what we often speak about internet being a democratic media that anybody can use to talk to the world, as well as when we talk about globalization and equal possibilities for all of us.

This entry was written by Carol and posted on 30 June, 2009 at 11:03 am. It is filed under In general and tagged cognitive, complexity, design, Internet, visualisation. Bookmark the permalink.
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Sir Ken Robinson –the recognized British author– is one of my favorites thinkers when I consider the areas of education and creativity. Addressing an audience he is witty, clever and has a brilliant sense of (British) humor. In a clear example that the world of Design is giving him the kind of recognition he deserves, he has recently received a RISD (Rhode Island School of Design) honorary degree (note that John Maeda –another brilliant person– is the president of RISD since June 2008).

According to a press release, the five people receiving an honorary Doctor of Fine Arts degree on this ceremony were ‘entrepreneur Caterina Fake, best known as the co-founder of Flickr; Apple designer Jonathan Ive, leader of the team behind the iconic iMac, iPod and iPhone; arts advocate and educator Roger Mandle, president of RISD from 1993-2008; writer and creativity expert Sir Ken Robinson, a cultural visionary who will also deliver the keynote address; and accomplished artist Betty Woodman, widely considered one of the most important ceramic artists working today’ (see ‘Sir Ken Robinson to Deliver Keynote Address at Rhode Island School of Design’s 2009’).

Robinson has received much recognition years ago in England by being the Chairman of a Committee in charge of writing a report on ‘the creative and cultural development of young people through formal and informal education’, whose title was  ‘All Our Futures: Creativity, Culture and Education’ (PDF, 1.3Mb ) and his latest book is ‘The Element. How finding your passion changes everything’.

I might be considered a latecomer to Sir Ken’s ideas: I saw him for the first time on a talk he gave at TED’s conference about how schools kill creativity. I remember that Prof. Thomas Bley projected the video of this talk on a Faculty meeting, while I was working in the University of Otago (kudos to TED for giving global availability and strong momentum to ‘ideas that worth spreading’). After hearing his thoughts on creativity and education, I added him to the list of authors I like to follow. According to Maeda, that was present that day back in 2006 at TED, he was so impressed by Robinson’s ideas that he changed his career pathway according to that (was it probably the motivation behind for leaving his ‘confortable’ position at the MIT and taking his actual place at RISD…?).

Finally, as Robinson says on his speech, life is not linear. Then why education should be…?

The video

This entry was written by Tomás and posted on 20 June, 2009 at 2:09 pm. It is filed under In video and tagged John Maeda, RISD, Sir Ken Robinson, TED. Bookmark the permalink.
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In the last decades designers have been moving away from ‘posters and toasters’ (in terms of Richard Buchanan) to a more complex scenario, computers and the Internet being pretty much responsible of this shift (according to Robert K. Logan, these are the fifth and sixth languages). For people educated as communication designers, this change move them (us) particularly to software related projects: quite a few of us have learned how to program in several languages and in many cases coding became one of our regular activities and apps like BareBones BBEdit our main tool (I would argue than in a computer dominated environment every design project produces some software output, being all designers coders by force; but I will leave this for another article). To say it clearly: after the advent of the world wide web designing and developing software started to be a realm where not only engineers could act. And I would say that the open source movement helped a lot to open and expand this frontier.

Nowadays, another hard barrier is moving away: the hardware one. With the development of the Arduino board, designing hardware is open to a wider spectrum of people, particularly because of the open source community-like spirit behind the project. And designers are clearly stepping into this arena.

I want to be clear on this point: I am not saying than before this designers didn’t work with hardware and that only engineers did (a prove of this is very much explained in Bill Moggridge’s Designing Interactions, a book that unfolds the history of interaction design and its main players, being quite a lot of them designers by trade). What I am saying is that Arduino makes this process easier, opening the field to many people that without this board won’t attempt to do any hardware related project by itself. And in a very good move, they are even talking to secondary students.

I will certainly get one of this boards and start doing some projects with sensors and actuators myself.

A few Arduino projects presented on the BBC

This entry was written by Tomás and posted on 29 May, 2009 at 11:33 am. It is filed under In video and tagged Arduino, interaction design, Logan. Bookmark the permalink.
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Daniel Pink is an american author who has been writing about Design and the right-brainers. On his book –A whole new mind. Why right-brainers will rule the future– he argues about the idea that lawers, accountants or computer programmers (“what our parents encouraged us to become…”, he said) are the professions that represents an old era dominated by ‘left-brainers’ and that the future belongs to “another kind of person with a different kind of mind”.

In a recent interview by Alissa Walker and published in dwell (Talking to DOD Keynote Dan Pink), he praise for Design, with ideas like these:

If you look at the problems we’re facing—the big problems, not the problem of, you know, is company X going to stay in business tomorrow or is someone going to meet their numbers next quarter—if you look at the big problems, they’re design problems.

Or this one, speaking about design literacy:

I don’t mean that everybody has to be a great designer, but everyone has to be literate in it. In the same way I consider it up there with numeracy. That is, to be in business, let alone to be a fully-functioning member of a democratic society, you have to be numerate, you have to know a little math. I think the same thing is true now about design thinking: You don’t have to be a great designer, but you have to be design-literate.

Pink’s ideas can be related to many others but I like to think them in a conversation with complexity, as explained by the French philosopher Edgar Morin (see Seven complex lessons in education for the future),  ‘wicked problems’, introduced by Horst Rittel and reincorporated into the design discourse by Richard Buchanan (note: where is Buchanan’s space on the web after leaving CMU’s School of Design…?), the increasing interest on Design shown by philosopers as Bruno Latour (see particularly his keynote for the Design History Conference, ‘A Cautious Prometheus? A Few Steps Toward a Philosophy of Design (with Special Attention to Peter Sloterdijk)’) and also with ideas of great designers as Thomas and Bettina Bley, whose tagline on Zebrains states “an advanced approach to create sustainable value utilising both sides of the brain in an unique mindset.”

This entry was written by Tomás and posted on 23 May, 2009 at 2:29 pm. It is filed under In general and tagged Bruno Latour, complexity, design, Edgar Morin, Horst Rittel, Richard Buchanan, wicked problems. Bookmark the permalink.
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A short research paper I wrote for the Master in Theory of Communicational Design in which I compare different ways of representing complex concepts and turning them into understandable and simple statements lead me to Visuwords. I am interested in the use of interaction interfaces that respond to the dynamic relations between body/mind, subject/object, matter/energy and the examples selected show the creation of cognitive spaces that with the use of mixed  media tools achieve the representation of complex data in a simple way, or to explain wicked processes to a general public that, in another context, would have found them impossible to comprehend.

In our actual context is important to invent other conceptual instruments and create new tools that will allow us to navigate mobile teritories and multidimensional spaces. “El juego de los vínculos” Denise Najmanovich, 2005.

I came across Visuwords™ online graphical dictionary, a Flash interface that shows the contents of WordNet® “an electronic lexical database, considered to be the most important resource available to researchers in computational linguistics, text analysis, and many related areas”as defined by the project director George A. Miller.

In 1985 many cognitive psycologists and computational linguists were formulating word meanings in terms of networks, diagrams with nodes to represente meanings and darts to represent relations between the meanings. “WordNet. An Electronic Lexical Database”, edited by Christiane Fellbaum.

With Visuwords you can look up words finding not only meanings like in a traditional dictionary but associations and concepts related. The diagrams are like a neural net, creating a powerful graphic representation of this relational association. In Visuwords website you can find detailed information on how it works: enter a word into the search box and a graphical tree with nodes appears with the selected word in the center. Double click a node to expand the tree, click and drag the background to move around or the nodes to expand connections, zoom with the mouse wheel. Hover in over nodes gives you a definition.

In WorldNet words are organized into sets rather than treated like isolated items and this way of performing relates more directly on how language and chains of meanings works. This means that for each word in WordNet, you can retrieve not only its synonyms, but also hypernyms, hyponyms, meronyms, and holonyms. In the article Visuwords: WordNet goes graphical Dmitri Popov explains that “WordNet is one of the best English language references available, but its command-line and rather primitive graphical interfaces don’t really do it justice.” And continues “Fortunately, there is a tool that does exactly that.”

This entry was written by Carol and posted on 8 May, 2009 at 11:37 pm. It is filed under In general and tagged cognitive, complexity, design, education, interface. Bookmark the permalink.
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Jim Jarmusch's #5 Golden Rule

Note: I saw the poster in the KISD blog: Originality is non-existent.

This is very interesting to note in our age of ‘rip, mix and burn’, where copyright is being criticized and the Creative Commons movement –leaded by Lawrence Lessig– is gaining momentum. This rule (#5 in Jarmusch’s set) and Godard’s quote could be perfectly applied to the work of Girl Talk, presented in RiP: A Remix Manifesto:

This entry was written by Tomás and posted on 29 April, 2009 at 11:23 am. It is filed under In general and tagged copyright, Creative Commons, Godard, Jarmusch, Lessig. Bookmark the permalink.
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